I would LOVE to see you take the time to deconstruct this article, one line at a time. It’d be a real eye-opener for all the commie pinko VTES players out there.

-Kevin

Well, as long as we’re going after commie pinko VTES players, count me in! Well I read Dr. Reich’s blog entry, and, sure enough, it’s dreadful beyond belief. Not it that typically way a politicians ideas are all hot air kind of dreadful, but in that much more pernicious way thinking that only macroeconomists seems to think.

I’ve never liked the Arcane/Divine divide in magic in what is now Pathfinder. It worked OK in first first and second edition D&D because there were really only two spell-casting classes, but as third edition D&D attempted to take the classes and make them into certain metrics such as Base Attack Bonus and Reflex Save bonus that are additive, the divide became increasingly wonky. For one, now that we had a skill system that was the same across classes, you had skills for sneaking around. If you multiclassed between different classes, your ability to sneak was related to how many skill points you continued to put into your stealth skills. Thus skills of the traditional Thief class from prior editions of D&D were now nicely delineated and could be treated as discrete parts of a greater whole.

The skill system attempted to do that with magic by giving one Spellcraft skill that related to your ability to determine magic regardless of it’s source, but in so doing they created a wonky element to their magic system because the skill itself was not, in any way, related to the actual working of magic. One could be a completely proficient high level wizard or cleric and not have a single rank in Spellcraft. So it was really just a knowledge skill, but why have one knowledge skill that represents two very different forms of magic when you have other knowledge skills that represent the different between knowledge of local events and knowledge of which crest belongs to the local noble? Continue reading The problem with Use Magic Device in Pathfinder